Between setting ambitious state conservation goals and joining the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) as a subnational signatory, the Healey-Driscoll Administration has distinguished Massachusetts as a national leader on biodiversity protection. This effort is critical — and laudable — given both global biodiversity declines and those in the commonwealth, where more than 450 species of plants and animals rank as endangered, a number sure to grow as climate change stresses ecosystems. But now comes the hard part: delivering on the visionary Biodiversity Goals for Massachusetts, the first of which, “Protect,” calls for preserving 30 percent of the state by 2030 and 40 percent by 2050. Luckily, Beacon Hill has eager and experienced partners in reaching these lofty targets: land trusts like ours.
Land trusts form a vibrant segment of Massachusetts’ wider conservation landscape. According to the Massachusetts Land Trust Coalition, 140 land trusts operate in the state, second only to California despite Massachusetts’ humble size. These organizations, which range from small, town-specific outfits of just a few volunteers to well-staffed powerhouses like the Trustees of Reservations, protect more than 250,000 acres — or just under 5 percent — of the state’s land area.
The ownership mix of Massachusetts’ forests makes land trusts’ work all the more consequential. Sixty-five percent of the state’s forests sit in private hands. The state government can — and should — acquire private land for the purpose of conserving it, but relying on government land purchases to achieve conservation goals will be financially and technically challenging.
Enter land trusts. They are real estate experts with a clear North Star: conserve land, unconstrained by the wider and weightier mandate of state government. They can often act quickly to protect the most at-risk properties. Indeed, most conservation transactions happen on the open market between willing buyers and sellers. By leveraging private philanthropic dollars, rather than simply taxpayer funds, land trusts and the private acres they safeguard deliver public dividends in the form of carbon storage, biodiversity restoration, and human well-being. Private conservation also enjoys relative insulation from changes in government conservation policy that tend to occur when new administrations take office.
These distinctions do not mean that public agencies and land trusts must pursue their conservation goals in isolation. Far from it: even greater progress is possible in partnership. An example of this is our organizations’ joint, recently completed effort to permanently protect 230 acres along the Westfield River in Huntington, called River’s Edge Wilderness Preserve. After we entered a contract to buy the property on the open market, the Healey-Driscoll Administration awarded the project more than $400,000 in grant funding from its Acquisition for Forest Reserves Grant Program. An additional $860,000 and counting in private funding, including from Mass Audubon’s forward-looking 30×30 Catalyst Fund, accompanied the state’s investment in the project.
The grant award is a concrete example of how the public and private sectors can come together to seek market-based solutions to our shared challenges. Forest reserves, as the state often refers to them, are places where logging is prohibited “in order to capture elements of biodiversity that can be missing from sustainably harvested sites.” The broader term we and others use for forests managed (or, perhaps more aptly, unmanaged) in this way is “wildlands.”
Wildlands like River’s Edge can lock in greater climate and biodiversity benefits than managed forests, and yet they represent just 2.3 percent of Massachusetts. Moreover, the project, as well as another of ours in Shutesbury, not only nudges the state towards its overall goal of 30 percent protection by 2030; it also contributes to the administration’s “Forests as Climate Solutions” goal of safeguarding 10 percent of Massachusetts’ forests as forest reserves, whether they be privately or publicly owned. That is a win-win for biodiversity, the planet, and people.
As federal conservation policy remains in flux, states and land trusts are filling the gap. Massachusetts can cement its status as a leader in biodiversity protection — and clinch its laudable conservation goals — by continuing to embrace partnerships with the land trusts and other private organizations that have helped preserve the state’s landscapes and wildlife for decades. These cross-sector undertakings are an indispensable component of a brighter, wilder future for the commonwealth and for New England as a whole.
Jon Leibowitz is president and CEO of Northeast Wilderness Trust, a regional forever-wild land trust that focuses on wilderness conservation. Kristin DeBoer is executive director of Kestrel Land Trust in Massachusetts’ Connecticut River Valley.